Chicago:
Campus of the Big Ideas>> The
launch of The Chicago Initiative-the University's five-year, $2
billion fund-raising effort-was marked by an April 12 event that
focused on Chicago's intellectual initiatives.

1

In
the beginning: what do our origins tell us about ourselves?

"All
human beings are curious about how things began," said Michael
Turner, the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner distinguished service
professor in astronomy & astrophysics and physics.

How
did things really begin? Approaching that deceptively simple question,
the panel brought together a cosmologist (Turner), a geneticist
(David Ledbetter, the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell professor
and chair of human genetics), and a mythologist (Wendy Doniger,
the Mircea Eliade distinguished service professor in the Divinity
School and South Asian languages & civilizations).

With
scrawled overheads, Turner explained how technological advances
have revolutionized our understanding of the physical universe.
Although we are made of "star stuff"-as the late Carl
Sagan, AB'54, SB'55, SM'56, PhD'60, famously put it-star stuff
is now known as "ordinary matter," making up just 4
percent of the universe. The rest is "exotic dark matter"
(30 percent) and "dark energy" (66 percent).

For
21st-century cosmologists, dark energy is a main puzzle of the
universe-which may actually be a "multiverse," with
a six-dimensional or even ten-dimensional structure. Warned Turner:
"Until we understand dark energy, we don't understand our
destiny-and maybe we won't even then."

As
the audience recovered from the revelation that our star stuff
is ordinary, Ledbetter noted that, genetically speaking, we're
mainly chimp: "We share 98 percent of the same genes. The
human-chimp divide is mostly in our heads."

Even
more humbling, the Human Genome Project (HGP) has shown that humans
have an unexpectedly small number of genes. "There are only
30,000 to 40,000 genes in humans," Ledbetter said, "while
a worm has 18,000, a fruit fly 13,000, and rice has 50,000."
For HGP researchers, the small number is a pleasant surprise;
but for biotechnology companies, "business plans were based
on revenue per gene," Ledbetter explained, "so they
were not too happy at the news."

"What
sort of origins do we look for when we look for our origins?"
asked Doniger, next at the podium. For religious scholars, part
of this search is for the origin of the texts themselves-for "the
Urtext."

Humility
may be disconcertingly new in the sciences, but in the ancient
Indian tradition, Doniger's specialty, it's not. The Rig Veda
(1000 B.C.), one of the oldest creation myths, is "open-ended
and vague," with lines like "There was neither nonexistence
nor existence then" and "Who really knows?" That
"charming humility" may appeal to today's audiences,
Doniger said, but some Hindus were troubled enough to invent a
god named 'Who,'" a semantic solution that "reminds
me of the old Abbott and Costello routine."

Creation
myths-including even the Big Bang-share an essential problem,
she said: they never really explain how we get from nothing to
something. "Myths fudge this. After the appearance of the
original 'something,' myths have a system of baroque detail that's
so complex, you get caught up in it." The Laws of Manu begin
with "vague undifferentiated chaos," Doniger noted,
that the creator organizes in very specific ways. "But,"
she persisted, like a child in Sunday school class, "where
did the creator come from?"-C.G.